A couple of months ago, I wrote about IM bots because the idea intrigued me and I think it would be a neat way to offer some interactive information on Utah.gov as well as internal applications like help desk.  Joe Heck turned me on to some other resources that are pretty interesting:

• DJ Adams has an article about ChatBot, a Jabber bot written in Perl using the Net::Jabber libraries. 
• Infobot is a daemon that connects to IRC servers and can be customized to conduct various chats.  IRC isn't IM, but its still interesting. 
• An article in The Perl Journal by Kevin Lenzo has a number of links and information about various bots for IRC (again with the IRC). 

I guess before we worry about an IM Bot, we ought to get an enterprise IM solution.  I've seen IRC used to great effect as an enterprise tool and feel like we're missing out by not supporting it more widely.  Not sure where we need to go to get there.  Its hard to drum up interest among a large enough group of people because not many of them use IM.  On the other hand, I'm hesitant to suggest it widely without a secure way for employees to use it in their work.  A classic chicken and egg problem.